Laptop's Hard Drives: Speed Also Matters

by Danijel Zivkovic

Buying a laptop? Want to upgrade your old one with a new hard drive? Besides hard drive's space size for storing your applications, documents, music, movies and other data, you should also pay attention to its speed performance. If you want fast access to stored data on your laptop's hard disk with SATA interface, higher rotation speed and larger buffer cache size.

Buy Laptop with SATA Drive
Serial ATA (SATA) hard drives use less power, so they save your laptop's battery. But, they also enchase your laptop's speed performance. Most hard drives usually support ATA/66 MB/sec), Ultra ATA/100 (100 MB/sec), or SATA (150 MB/sec) interfaces. The numbers refer to the macimum burst rate at which the drive can pass data to the system (66, 100, or 150 megabytes per second). SATA transmit data in a serially (in a single stream) as opposed to PATA or Parallel ATA which is commonly referred to as an IDE hard drive.

Check the Hard Drive's Rotational Spedd
Don't forget to check the hard drive rotational spedd! The hard drive rotational speed tells you how fast the drive spins its disks in revolutions per minute (rpm). A higher rpm means higher drive performance. A 7,200 rpm hard drive is faster than a 5,400 rpm or 4,200 rpm and gives better performance.

Large Buffer Cache Size - Better Performance
Buffer Cache Size is a temporary data storage are used to enhance drive performance. When the computer request data from the hard disk if that data is in the cache, there is a performance boost directly related to the speed of the cache. Large buffer cache size usually result in better hard drive performace. Buffer cache size on the most of laptop's hard drive is usually 2 MB, 4 MB or 8 MB.

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This article is provided by Laptop Computers Blog.